The Our Town - Clarenville Blog by Paul Tilley

In principle, most everybody would agree that working together to support one another is a good idea.  Could this same approach work for our region's towns and communities? One of the biggest challenges for political leaders in Newfoundland and Labrador - particularly rural Newfoundland and Labrador - is figuring out how to sustain the hundreds of little settlements that dot our coastline.  The vast majority of these settlements depended on the fishery, many of them are remote, and few of them have any form of local government to provide basic community services.   Today, the continued closure of the inshore cod fishery has meant that the next generation simply does not exist in these settlements, leaving an aging and shrinking population.  This is occurring against a backdrop of rising expectations for the continuance of services - most of which have been traditionally provided, at no additional charge to residents, by the provincial and federal governments.  In the face of increa